“They had it in for us, didn't they? Right from the beginning. Who'd have thought that we were so important..?”
“To be told so little – to such an end – and still, finally, to be denied an explanation...”
“In our experience, most things end in death.”
- 'Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead’, Tom Stoppard
It’s something of an absurd question, of course. Absurdism, surely that needs to stay indefinable by definition. We can say it overlaps greatly with Dadaism. But they're not identical.
Dadaism inclined heavily to the political, to shock tactics launched against bourgeois society. Its schtick is to exist permanently in the interchange between nihilism and insurrection, never quite siding with either. While Absurdism is more existential, more likely to reflect a general modern or even human condition. Dadaism is volatile, a corrosive that will try to burn its way out of any container it's put in. Absurdism is weighty. Not in the sense of great literary worth, in the sense of rocks in your backpack.
Absurdism is best seen through the collision term 'passive protagonist'. The term protagonist has a double meaning – the central character, and the advocate or champion. Normally this doesn't trouble us too much, as the two travel so comfortably together. You could pretty much substitute 'hero' for 'protagonist' most of the time, without spannering any of the works.
But the hero brings meaning to his world, his actions ensure good will prevail and all the rest of it. While the Absurdist protagonist looks hopefully for meaning already existent in the world, and comes up confounded. In fact the two probably grew up together, as conjoined twins, each a reaction to the other, at least if the emblematic hero is taken as the purest form of the heroic type.
But… mirror, mirror on the wall… the awkward yet inescapable truth is that we live our lives more as Absurdist protagonists than heroes, we are more Josef K than Flash Gordon.
In Absurdism the protagonist is like a child on their first day in school, like a dreamer in a dream state. Mark Fisher summed it up: “This world was made for me, yet I have no place in it.” The adult often chooses to remember the child state indulgently, as a form of escapism, a break from responsibilities, filled with curious wonder at the beguiling world. But children often feel an all-thumbs frustration with what surrounds them. While it can have its effect on you, you are unable to work any traction upon it. Even objects do not seem obedient to you, while they seem so acquiescent in adult hands. You live in a world that makes no sense to you. And that is its power over you.
And so Absurdism’s passive protagonists are very often children or dreamers. In the case of both Carrol’s Alice and McCay’s Little Nemo they're both. Yet they don't need to be. Josef K from Kafka's ’The Trial’, is perhaps the ultimate passive protagonist. Nobody bothers explaining the rules to him, like the child in a particularly badly run custody case, and he can only surrender to the course of events.
In this way, though they may overlap philosophically, the Existential novels of Sartre and Camus are not Absurd. They take place in ‘real’ words, not just places we have heard of but which conform to recognisable rules. Absurdist works are always ‘unreal’, the most basic facts uncertain, and for that reason bleaker. Existential protagonists may discover agency, usually with great difficulty and at huge cost, but the task is not impossible. In Absurdism, reason is not just absent. The universe actively defies it, and works to repel it should you dare to try to wield it. The laws of physics themselves may decide to turn on you.
If there is an uncertainty to Absurdism, it lies in the humour. Because many Absurdist writers were held to be important, they were taken in deadly earnest by critics. Yet there's accounts of Kafka reading his works aloud to his friends, and all falling into convulsions of laughter. But it's not just that the humour is black. It's that even when you find laughter irresistible, you're never quite sure that's the right response. Is it just a defence mechanism on your part? It's like the adage about a laugh being a scream played at a different speed.
So if Absurdism has to contain humour, does humour have to contain Absurdism? Perhaps ‘have’ is too strong a term, but its common. As Priestley said: “Good clowns never try to be funny, they are eager, hopeful creatures, lost in a hostile world, and with great clowns the very furniture is menacing, never to be trusted.”
A friend, a huge fan of Laurel and Hardy, once told me that as a child he’d found them unbearable to watch. The way events constantly thwarted their plans seemed too much like real life. Which is perhaps why comedies can have ‘bad’ protagonists (Wile E Coyote, Dick Dastardly, Black Adder) whose perpetually failing schemes are dampened from invoking our sympathy.
But nothing can entirely remove the central dilemma. Absurdist fiction can appear like some sort of homeopathic remedy, by recognising the absurdity of the situation in a work of fiction we emerge better prepared to engage the absurdity in our lives. But does this work? Do we make Josef K our whipping boy to console ourselves that we would not become as weighted down as him, that we would fare better if given the role of protagonist?
